The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [98]
Some parents believe that their children become wild and unmanageable after eating sucrose; they have been known to send their offspring to another child’s birthday party carrying his or her own little cake made with fructose or aspartame. Yet most studies that have tested such children in the laboratory—away from their parents—have refuted the parents’ claims.
The mechanism purportedly at work here is a condition known as reactive hypoglycemia. The theory is that the body may overcompensate for the consumption of large amounts of sugar by releasing too much insulin, which drastically lowers your blood sugar, causing confusion, anxiety, muscular weakness, and personality changes. The idea that unruly children and prisoners are generally afflicted with this condition seems to have arisen in 1977, when an Ohio probation officer, Barbara Reed, told a U.S. Senate Committee that, after reading a pamphlet entitled Low Blood Sugar, she had changed the diets of the probationers under her care and accomplished remarkable improvements in their behavior.
But reactive hypoglycemia is a rare condition, and most scientifically controlled research has failed to document its presence in hyperactive or violent people. A 1986 study at the National Institute of Mental Health was unable to find any cognitive or behavioral consequences of eating sugar. A study of hyperactive children at the University of Toronto found that they reacted the same to sucrose, aspartame, and saccharin. And in 1990 a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that a breakfast full of sucrose actually improved the performance of the group of fifty-eight white and fifty-seven black juvenile delinquents they studied.
Does white sugar make you fat? A gram of sugar has the same four calories in each gram as any other carbohydrate or any gram of protein. All carbohydrates have a substantial advantage over dietary fats, which, with nine calories in every gram, are more energy dense and can be effortlessly converted into body fat. The conversion of excess carbohydrate calories—simple or complex—into fat is energy intensive, using up as much as 20 percent of the carbohydrate calories in the process. But complex carbohydrates have only a minor caloric advantage over simple sugars; the additional energy you burn away as your body breaks them down is extremely small.
There is an idea floating around that white sugar somehow bypasses the body’s regulatory mechanism and tricks us into overeating. This has been repeatedly disproved. In one study, Kool-Aid was prepared in two ways, one sweetened with sugar and the other with aspartame. Both were given to children an hour before lunch. Those who drank the sugary Kool-Aid compensated for the extra calories by eating less at lunch than those whose Kool-Aid contained the noncaloric sweetener. The body sees sugar for what it is.
Do chubby people have a sweet tooth? No. Obese adults actually consume less sugar than skinny adults. And taste tests have shown that neither group craves sugar more strongly than the other.
Does white sugar cause heart disease, diabetes, anemia, and other degenerative diseases? No. Diet and Health (1989), the National Research Council’s compendious review of everything that was then known about nutrition and disease, summarized hundreds of studies on the subject and concluded that “sugar consumption (by those with an adequate diet) has not been established as a risk factor for any chronic disease other than dental caries in humans.” Population studies in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Framingham, Massachusetts, found that healthy men consumed more carbohydrates than men who developed coronary heart disease; the type of carbohydrate did not matter. Most authorities recommend that added sugar be limited to 10 or 11 percent of our calories; our average intake today is only slightly higher. But in people with elevated triglycerides, especially diabetics, too much fructose eaten